1) Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to a clipboard for holding worksheets at factory production lines, and in particular to clipboards conveniently used in such situations where miltiple worksheets carrying a great deal of instructions for the work has to be quickly handled in limited space as automobile assembly lines designed for standardized projects covering a wide range of models and kinds.
2) Description of the Prior Art
In automobile production lines where a series of assembling operations are carried out on individual car bodies, as they are moved along on a conveyor belt, according to standardized schemes, a complete body of computer-processed instructions for each product, presented in about 10 worksheets, has to be rapidly surveyed and precisely followed by factory employees at work. The workers are required to do the automobile assembling just assigned to them in the correct sequence of steps while looking through the worksheets giving the instructions in an orderly manner.
Conventionally, when a worker is supplied with a whole set of sheets of instructions for his work, say, at an automobile production line, the sheets may be individually taped in or on the work, or an automobile, at locations where they are empirically believed to be convenient for the specific operation or set of operations assigned. Otherwise, the all sheets may be put in the stacked form at a specific place near the work site.
In either case, however, inconveniences involved have been found annoying. Since such worksheets are rather large, 37 centimeter wide and 38 centimeter long in most cases, a size intended to facilitate reading and handling, they take up large space when they are taped individually in different spots. In addition, detaching all the worksheets from taped places for submission to a factory supervisor or foreman at the end of the work is a time-consuming task. Furthermore, huge quantities of tape are consumed during the day's work, adding to production costs. Where the whole worksheets is placed in one and the same place throughout the work, they often come to fall out of sight for the worker when he is at work away from the previous operations.